This research program will develop and demonstrate theory and techniques for efficient collection, transmission and processing of information in wirelessly-connected sensor networks. This fundamental research is aimed towards development of a revolutionary wireless sensor node, optimized for infrastructure monitoring, and characterized by ultra-low power consumption. Power consumption, installation complexity and installation cost are significant bottlenecks to the widespread deployment of wireless infrastructure monitoring that will be addressed by this research. This research program improves energy efficiency and battery lifetime through the use of compressed sampling in sensing, physical communication and network communication and through the co-design of hardware and algorithms.
A theme of the research is the development of compressive sampling techniques. Compressive sampling techniques will be developed to reduce the number of samples that need to taken by sensors, to optimize the placement of sensing nodes, and to minimize the amount of data transmitted by the sensing nodes. This research will develop new theoretical approaches to signal sampling, to ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless communication of acquired information, and to sensor network architecture and protocols. Development of new theory and algorithms will go hand-in-hand with the development of new circuit techniques. New integrated circuit techniques for analog-to-digital conversion and wireless communication will be developed.
A Center for Structural Health Monitoring through Compressed Sensing will be formed to broaden the impact of this research. The scope of the education component of this program targets grade-school, undergraduate and graduate students. An interdisciplinary curriculum of courses in Math, Civil Engineering and Electrical Engineering will be created. The center will also develop an extensive outreach education program.
